We are looking for a new Head of Postgraduate Programme for ’The History of Design and Material Culture.’ Taught in conjunction with the Royal College of Art, this is the preeminent programme in the field and it is growing in connection with exciting developments at both Museum and College. Reporting to the Director of Research and Collections and working closely with the Head of Programme at the Royal College of Art, the new Head will provide leadership for teaching and learning, research, and management of the resources of the programme and staff.

Infrastructure has always had a privileged relationship to both expertise and the public in modern government. But in the early 21st century, this relationship is inflected in novel ways. The purposes public infrastructure was meant to serve—welfare, quality of life, economic development, and so on—persist. But they are often conceptualized differently, promoted by different agencies, and articulated through novel technological and collective relations. This issue of Limn explores new formations of infrastructure, publicness, and expertise.The contributions examine how new forms of expertise conceive the public and make claims in its name, how publics are making novel claims on experts (and claims to expertise), and how earlier norms and techniques of infrastructure provisioning are being adapted in the process.…

If the informal use of the internet through personal devices on board merchant vessels encounters barriers due to patchy infrastructure and weather issues, then the formal provision of ICT-empowered telemedicine has brought to an end the era when the sea made the ship an entirely isolated environment. The ship in the age of ICT appears as Foucault described it: as a “heterotopia”; a place that is both isolated and penetrable. My interest in merchant marines was sparked by joining a cargo ship sailing from Australia to Singapore as a passenger/English teacher in 2009. The passage, though short, gave me the opportunity to discover the social life of these communities, and I became intrigued by the issue of connectivity at sea.…

]]>http://www.materialworldblog.com/2016/12/information-and-communication-technology-and-wellbeing-in-the-merchant-marines/feed/08771Notes from the Forest: Engaging with a hunter’s world of materialshttp://www.materialworldblog.com/2016/11/notes-from-the-forest-engaging-with-a-hunters-world-of-materials/
http://www.materialworldblog.com/2016/11/notes-from-the-forest-engaging-with-a-hunters-world-of-materials/#commentsTue, 22 Nov 2016 14:07:42 +0000http://www.materialworldblog.com/?p=8751Thorsten Gieser, Lecturer in Anthropology, Department of Kulturwissenschaft, University of Koblenz-Landau, Germany

A winter’s day, in a forest in central Germany. At dusk, more than fifty hunters and beaters stand around the ‘gallow’, a wooden structure with a long beam on which the dead bodies of hunted game are hung after they have been field dressed. A small group of hunters play their horns and the eerie melodies of ‘Sows dead!’ and ‘Halali!’ fill the air, accompanied by the occasional dog who howls along. It is the end of a hunting day. After several hours on the beater’s track, I feel exhausted and tired. My boots and my trousers are smeared with blood and mud. Although I washed my hands briefly in icy water, there is still dried blood under my fingernails and in the lines of my skin.

Why would somebody forgo juicy steaks, delicate smoked salmon, velvety goat cheese, and the many seemingly delicious foods people eat? Why would somebody choose to submit themselves to the inconvenience of not being able to eat outside of their home without some advanced planning? Why would they refuse to wear products widely seen as fashionable and insist on knowing what their hygiene products are made of?

Why would anybody be vegan?

The individuals I conducted fieldwork with—members of what I term the London Vegan Community—are regularly asked this very question by family, friends, and even strangers. In popular media, veganism is often framed as being trendy and undertaken for supposed health benefits. While many—certainly not all—of my participants discuss health as being a vital component of their veganism, and many first learned about veganism due to its increasing popularity, each of my participants assert that veganism is an “ethical choice”; for London Vegans, veganism is a “social justice movement.”

As I write, we find ourselves living in a time widely referred to as the Anthropocene.…

I must admit, this review has been a long time coming. I was given Digital Materialities and asked to review it many months ago. I proceeded to read it immediately, but writing the review, well not so immediately. At the time, I had been in the process of exams and dissertation fieldwork. Several of the book’s chapters were very useful while I was working through concepts for my own work. Since reading this book, I have moved to another country and read several other books and articles. Yet, importantly, I had been given a hard copy of the book and it managed to make it across the ocean with me—sitting in my suitcase, underneath my belongings, until I finally got around to unpacking.…

Recently I visited the exhibition You can’t please them all – a retrospective of modern Indian painter Bhupen Khakhar (1934-2003) at Tate Modern, London. The show, curated by Chris Dercon, former Tate Modern director, and Nada Raza (research curator), opened on June 1 2016 in London and will travel to the Deutsche Bank Kunsthalle in Berlin in November 2016. I came to know about the show due to reviews that circulated via social media prior to the opening, and which caused a serious controversy and protest against neo-colonial attitudes towards a still imagined ‘non-European other’ by art experts in India and Great Britan. With this post, I wish to provide some anthropological observations on the controversy which demonstrates a crucial claim for equality in the international art world.…

]]>8726Night-Time Wanderings and the Out-of-Placehttp://www.materialworldblog.com/2016/10/night-time-wanderings-and-the-out-of-place/
Mon, 17 Oct 2016 13:34:28 +0000http://www.materialworldblog.com/?p=8718As I walked home late one night last week, I came upon a scene that perhaps many of us are familiar with. In a dark corner of a quiet area there lay a pair of new looking shoes, laced up and stood together, as if worn by a phantom man (they were a man’s shoes). There was something jarring about the scene. The shoes were too clean to really “belong” on the street, but yet there was nobody in sight, and who goes home without their shoes? After a moment I walked on, of course, but the image stayed with me. I couldn’t help thinking about the circumstances in which those new shoes came to be on that dark street corner.…]]>8718First RAI Photography Salonhttp://www.materialworldblog.com/2016/10/first-rai-photography-salon/
http://www.materialworldblog.com/2016/10/first-rai-photography-salon/#commentsMon, 17 Oct 2016 08:58:49 +0000http://www.materialworldblog.com/?p=8713